Fast Track

CKAN, a versatile data management system, lets you build a portal to share your open data.

- Marco Fioretti

Open data would be of little use if it wasn’t easy to automatically publish and update and subsequently find, download, and integrate with other open data, straight from the primary sources.

The Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (CKAN) [1], a key component of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s mission to promote open data [2], is a collection of tools for implementing open data hubs and portals. If you have a dataset that you’d like to make available as open data, CKAN gives you a head start on implementing the necessary infrastructure.

The CKAN tools help you manage and federate the data. It also comes with advanced geospacial features, search capabilities, metadata, and visualization options. Using CKAN tools and best practices, you can build a portal for your open data with the least possible effort.

How CKAN Works

CKAN is based on open standards and free/ open source software. At its core, most of CKAN is Python code, released under an aGPL license. Other main components are the PostgreSQL database engine and the Apache Solr search server [3].

CKAN websites make it easy to find, browse, and analyze open data manually. CKAN’s real value, however, is its consistent support for creating federated catalogs of open data and, importantly, finding and reusing the same data automatically.

CKAN does this through application programming interfaces (APIs) [4] that support REST-style data exchange and announce and export entire datasets according to the Data Catalogue Vocabulary Application Profile (DCAT-AP) [5]. DCAT-AP is an open standard for describing public sector datasets,